errors

Rats! I’ve been found out. We squeakers-by hope to slide through life without ever having our fallibilities and failings found out. When I became a graduate student at the University of Chicago I knew at once I was in over my head.

Cats, they say, have nine lives. My cat columns, I say, will have only two. My first (April 5) was a pioneering, tentative but catastrophically flawed venture into the aelurophilic world. It spawned a cataract of letters. Fax and e-mail contributed yet more catcalls.

Moons have passed since I’ve passed on to you some of the little items readers send me. These collections of errors, mostly typographical, are a popular, often requested feature of this column. (Why do people prefer the reproduction of other people’s errors to my own errorless prose?) In any case, these are dated items, which I’ve carried over from the previous millennium.